Stephen Arthur

Letters

Better than nothing

The four letters in May’s Socialist Review vividly show
the abuses of psychiatry ranging from its repressive ideology, the
class and racial bias, to the abuses of drugs. After working in
psychiatry for 14 years I could name many more examples.

However, it is a mistake for socialists to take a pure
anti-psychiatry position. It is like being anti-teacher or anti
social worker and dismissing completely the limited amount of caring
these workers are able to carry out.

Dileep Bagnall calls all workers in psychiatry ‘agents of social
control for the ruling class’. Presumably all SWP nurses had better
shoot themselves!

To take this position echoes how the left helped close the mental
hospitals of Italy, and how the ‘do-gooding’ left of Britain,
most of whom had never spent time in an institution, welcomed the
Tories’ money saving closure programme.

The argument went, ‘psychiatry is bad – we’re better off
without it.’ Tell that to the thousands of ex-patients wandering
the streets and dying in various ways in their hundreds. Tell it to
the families of the 40 or so patients who killed themselves after
Torbay closed its acute unit a few years ago.

Working in a mental hospital caused me to become a socialist.
There is no contradiction if you realise that even ‘good
psychiatry’ can only help the odd individual in our sick world.